Follow the crazy adventures of an Alabama cyclist taking on the Race Across America in 2015.

Alabama State Time Trial race report

I had been looking forward to this race for the past couple weeks because the course is amazing – with lots of hills – in a topographically interesting area. Several ridge lines merge and end near the turnaround point. See the topocreator map from my post about the 2010 time trial (where I did much better).

Well, on Thursday night Kristine and I celebrated our 9 year wedding anniversary. In the middle of the night, I woke up with some severe intestinal issues – eventually losing 6 pounds of water weight and collapsing on the floor on the way back from the bathroom in the early morning. After spending an entire day in bed and resting and drinking, I started to feel better in the evening. So I thought maybe if I felt really good in the morning, I would go ahead and do the time trial. Not a good idea as indicated by the stats in the screenshot with 1 mile to go in my race:

By the time I had driven to the start (the original plan was to ride to the start for a 90-100 mile ride like Wednesday), I was not feeling great anymore. After a 12 mile easy warm-up, I was feeling less great. Travis Sherman said it best – “you look hung over”. I started out with a target wattage of 325 watts and was able to maintain that for about 5 minutes – at which point I started getting nauseous. My next thought was “ok”, let’s shoot for 300watts. Then as I couldn’t even get my current power over 300, I thought maybe “250” would be ok. A couple minutes later I realized that the only way I was going to finish the race at all is if I backed way off, so I started soft pedaling to eventually finish in 6th place (last).

So, here is future advice for anybody with food poisoning 24 hours before the start of a 40k tt … even if you feel all better when you wake up the morning of the race, don’t do it. Stay in, rest, and watch the first stage of the Tour de France instead!

That was almost exactly my experience (albeit with a considerably lower targeted wattage), and I didn’t even have a case of food poisoning to blame. I just flat out melted down. Last Saturday, I rode 7 hours and climbed nearly 12,000′ with no problem. Today I rode 1 hour and climbed 1100′ and 6 hours later I’m still cramping.